Waiting for Charlie

Everyone had told him to speak to her like normal. But how could he, when her shaved head slumped toward the window away from him, when the hospital smock had loosened, revealing a chest freckled and flat as a washboard with her large breasts fallen to the sides, when she lay propped up beneath a sign that read: PT DOES NOT HAVE BONE ON RIGHT SIDE OF SKULL.

They had removed it because of inflammation after the accident.

Otherwise, she would have died. Now, weeks later, the swelling was down and the side without the bone had caved in like a rotten melon. He’d grown used to his own deteriorations: his hip, his lungs, his skin that tore like wet tissue. He had to sleep with oxygen. He bled for no good reason through his clothes. But looking at this child, not even twenty-five, so badly damaged she had not yet surfaced to consciousness, was not something he was ever going to get used to. He would never come back here again. Never.

Like normal.

“Hello, Charlotte.” He waited for her to turn and greet him. Of course he knew the circumstances, but when, in the past ninety-one years, had he spoken to someone in a quiet room and not had them respond?

He spoke louder. “I said, ‘Hello, Charlotte.’ ” He was certain that within the hour he was allotted he would snap her out of it. He had accomplished far greater things than that in this lifetime.

He knew his grandchildren were scared of him. Or had been. He’d been big and loud. He hadn’t liked their gum chewing or their back talk. He felt sorry now for all the times he’d told this one her hair was too short, that it was bad enough she called herself Charlie. But sometimes direction was what children needed.

There was a chair by the window. He pulled it closer and sat.

“This is your grandfather, Charlotte. I’ve come down by myself to see you. I want you to wake up now. You’ve gotten everybody too worried about you.” He remembered his wife telling him not to say anything negative and added: “You’re a very good actress but come on now.”

There was a loud cracking noise, like something hard and brittle splitting in two. He saw the wide mouth of a tube resting on her collarbone. He recognized the contraption from his last operation. It pumped into the air fifteen percent more oxygen, and it had made him feel safe. It didn’t seem to be rubbing against anything but the washcloth underneath. Her jaw shifted and there was another crack. It came from inside her mouth.

“Hey, don’t do that.” He put his hands on her cheeks. Her skin was slick with sweat. Beneath his fingers, her chin swayed once more from one side to the other, releasing the terrible sound. He was frightened he’d find every tooth in pieces, but when he pried open her mouth, they were all fine. They were even familiar. She’d spent a whole summer with him, the summer her older sisters went to camp and her parents divorced. She was eight and all her teeth seemed to be falling out or growing in. Nearly every night, she showed him the latest developments. She’d been a nervous child, but she’d grown into a bold, confident young woman. Overconfident, perhaps. All his grandchildren were overconfident. When he complained of this, of their aggression and recklessness, he was laughed at. The pot calling the kettle, they said.

He’d seen a picture of the trail she’d fallen on. “I wouldn’t have gone down that slope. It was too steep and too icy and you could see the rocks were bare. It was a foolish thing.” He didn’t care. She needed scolding. She was probably sick of people coming in cooing and mooning and pitying her.

She needed a firm hand. “A very foolish, stupid thing.”

On a whiteboard facing her bed, facing the sign about her skull, her sisters had written in Magic Marker: “Good Morning, Charlie! It’s Saturday Feb. 15. You’ve had a skiing accident. We’re all at Dad’s and will be back soon. Can’t wait to see you!” All over that wall were photographs, posters, drawings, poems, and letters. There were red roses and a slew of valentines on the radiator.

In a basket on the windowsill beside him were several glass bottles. One was full of little red beads. He turned it around and the label said WHOLE

RED PEPPERS. The others were liquid: SEAWATER, GRENADINE, VINEGAR.

“How are you all doing?”

A nurse was in the doorway. He tried to think if there was anything he needed, then remembered he wasn’t the patient.

She glanced down at the basket in his lap. “Were you thinking of giving her a little aromatherapy?”

“No.”

“Well,” she said in the way nurses did, thoroughly inured to resistance.

“Her therapist doesn’t come on Sundays so it might be a good idea. All you do is remove the cap and let her take in a few whiffs. Smells are amazing.

They trigger memory quicker and deeper than any other kind of stimulant to the senses.”

He chose a bottle whose label had been peeled off. He unscrewed the cap and the smell of lemons flooded the room. He breathed it in eagerly. It was a beautiful smell. He thought of his three granddaughters in the summer, placing rusty lawn chairs in the yard and squeezing lemons into their brown hair. After the divorce, they often slept over, though his son’s apartment was only a few blocks away. They said the beds were more comfy. He put the bottle beneath her nose. There was no reaction.

“Do you remember Dennis Wight, Charlotte? He was asking about you the other day.”

Once he had found Dennis on one of the lawn chairs in the middle of the night, snoring loud enough to bring down the house a story. The boy had been waiting for a glimpse of Charlie through a crack in the guest bedroom’s curtain.

“You girls used to get so tan. And your hair had streaks of gold.” Without looking, he could feel the bleakness of February through the window, the half-frozen mud puddles in the parking lot below. “Summer is a beautiful season, Charlie.”

“It sure is.”

He had forgotten about the nurse. He wasn’t sure what he’d said and what he’d just thought about. He put the cap back on the lemon and brought out the peppers. No smell was released. He brought them to his nose. Still nothing. He shook the bottle and smelled and his head exploded. He coughed and wheezed and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. During all this the nurse laughed. He wished she would go to hell.

He held out the bottle for Charlie. Again, she breathed lightly without response. In the war he had seen plenty of death, but never in all his years had he seen something as terrifying as this face before him now. All of its

muscles had gone flaccid. The flesh was like jelly. Her chin pooled onto her neck; her cheeks flopped back near her ears. Even her nostrils had flattened.

Physically, she had lost everything that had once defined her. He looked away, down at his own legs. His old brown pants billowed out like a skirt; the cuffs dragged on the ground. His belt, the leather worn thin on the first notch, was now fastened at the last one. Soon he would have to puncture a new hole. They were both adrift from their bodies. And without the body, what are we? Had he ever truly believed in a soul?

He shook the bottle hard and kept shaking until he heard her take a breath. It made him sneeze four times, reminding him of sunlight and pollen and dusty books, but it had no effect on her at all.

The summer her parents divorced, she’d walked from room to room complaining of boredom.

“Aren’t you bored in there, Charlie? Aren’t you horribly bored by this coma?”

The nurse reached over the bed and put a hand on his arm. “Don’t.”

“Am I not allowed to say the word ‘coma’? Is that a dirty word around here?”

“It could frighten her.”

“Well, she’s frightening me.” He hadn’t heard himself whine like that since he was a little boy.

“Maybe it’s time to go now.”

“No. Not for me. It’s not time for me to go.” He felt how fast his heart was beating and knew he had to calm down. He rummaged through the basket and found a bottle of blue liquid marked AFTERSHAVE. He opened it and breathed in dances when he was young: the bathroom of his parents’

house, his brother, Tom, hogging the sink, and the smell of his own cologne in the hair of a girl at the end of the night. He had never been religious, but he knew that if anything happened to Charlie, Tom would be waiting for her. They would be about the same age now. Tom was only twenty-four when he died. It seemed impossible that he had lived sixty-seven years without him.

He feigned another coughing fit and wiped his eyes. It was too much.

There was too much unnecessary loss. There always had been. He held the aftershave up to Charlie’s flat nose. She took it in slowly, and opened one eye. The pupil rolled down and she looked straight at him. He was too dumbfounded to greet her. Here she was. He had done it.

“That happens,” the nurse said. “Only that one eye. Around and around.”

Obediently, the eye began to travel the length and breadth of the room.

When it swung back around to him, he waved and smiled as if for a camera.

No one knew, not even the specialists with their fancy jargon and machines, if Charlie was still in there.

He put the blue bottle back and idly fished through the basket again. He wasn’t sure he had the stamina for another and was relieved when the nurse suggested that three was plenty for one session.

“Those were neat smells, weren’t they, Charlie?” she said before she checked her vital signs and left.

Her presence had been an annoyance, but the room seemed drained and vacant after she left. He took his granddaughter’s hand, a hand clenched tight on her chest, and tried to pray. He’d never learned to pray. All he knew how to do was beg. He begged for this child to be spared, but even in the small chamber of his own head, his voice was faint.

He sat back in the chair. He hadn’t noticed the enormous clock opposite him. He still had forty more minutes.

Footfall was steady outside in the hallway. Occasionally a nurse or orderly would slow and glance in, having been informed about the very old man visiting in room 511.

“I am an arrogant man,” he whispered. “I thought this would be easier.”

It was a nice room, bigger than any he’d had here. There was something comforting about hospitals now. He liked the ambience, the voices on the intercom system, calling out names of strangers, the steam coming out of the oxygen tube, the bright light of the buzzer near the bed, the rolling of carts and chairs in the hallway, the clean sterile smells. He felt safer here than at home where accidents were waiting, where help was across town.

Here, death felt far, far away.

The chair was comfortable. A light rain began to tap at the window. He could feel the extra oxygen in the room and took it in gratefully. Sleep came over him, thick and slow, and just before he surrendered to it, he felt the rhythm of his breathing falling into Charlie’s, falling into an easier, simpler place where they might finally reach each another.